Posted on 07/30/2011 8:01:41 PM PDT by TheDingoAteMyBaby
I wish I was kidding:
Would Americans increase peace in family life and strengthen family bonds if they adopted more accepting attitudes about sex and what’s allowable under the family roof? I’ve interviewed 130 people, all white, middle class and not particularly religious, as part of a study of teenage sex and family life here and in the Netherlands. My look into cultural differences suggests family life might be much improved, for all, if Americans had more open ideas about teenage sex.
Amy Schalet is a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, via an education at Berkeley and Harvard and a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Francisco. So it’s safe to say that I’m not surprised that she’s staked out some ground somewhere on the far left of left in her new book. As the father of a newly minted (one week ago) teenage daughter, however, this one has my head spinning around. And not in the fun head spinning around kind of way.
While I haven’t read the book, I am using some of the points that Dr. Schalet chose to illustrate her conclusions. Some of these conclusions seem more like generalizations based on what she picked out from her own book to make her case.
Kimberly and Natalie dramatize the cultural differences in the way young women experience their sexuality. (I have changed their names to protect confidentiality.) Kimberly, a 16-year-old American, never received sex education at home. “God, no! No, no! That’s not going to happen,” she told me. She’d like to tell her parents that she and her boyfriend are having sex, but she believes it is easier for her parents not to know because the truth would “shatter” their image of her as their “little princess.”
Natalie, who is also 16 but Dutch, didn’t tell her parents immediately when she first had intercourse with her boyfriend of three months. But, soon after, she says, she was so happy, she wanted to share the good news. Initially her father was upset and worried about his daughter and his honor. “Talk to him,” his wife advised Natalie; after she did, her father made peace with the change. Essentially Natalie and her family negotiated a life change together and figured out, as a family, how to adjust to changed circumstance.
It is quite unfortunate that “Kimberly” didn’t receive any sex education at home. As this article is laid out, she is supposed to be indicative of the American teenage experience. And she may very well have been if this was written in 1965. It’s true that I haven’t conducted any research on this subject. I am, however, fully immersed in the child-rearing experience, which, at the very least, gives me a legitimate frame of reference from which to form a somewhat informed opinion about this subject.
I’m comfortable responding with anecdotal experiences as there isn’t much detail about the research criteria that would seem to be most relevant to the opinions Dr. Schalet offers. The sample is described as “white, middle class and not particularly religious.” I get the “white” part but am not sure I think that the American and Dutch middle classes are perfectly analogous. And “not particularly religious” is about as helpful as “somewhat taller than a few of the people who live behind one of my next door neighbors.”
The “Gosh, why can’t we just be more like Europe?” meme is a familiar one with academics who write for the New York Times and could easily warrant a book-length response so I’ll leave that for another day.
Another one of the most tedious things about the Times in recent years has been the effort made by contributors to work a left-leaning talking point in any article. Dr. Schalet doesn’t pass up the chance to shill:
Respecting what she understood as her family’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Kimberly only slept with her boyfriend at his house, when no one was home.
Hey — guess what I got an email about from Obama for America last Friday?
But enough about the hack nature of a newspaper that was great about a thousand years ago. Back to the book. Let us go to yet another quote from the good doctor:
The difference in their experiences stems from divergent cultural ideas about sex and what responsible parents ought to do about it. Here, we see teenagers as helpless victims beset by raging hormones and believe parents should protect them from urges they cannot control.
Or we see them as children grappling with their first encounters with adulthood. I don’t view my daughter as a “victim” of adolescence, I see her as a very, very young person who doesn’t need to be thrown into independence without an instruction book of sorts and a safety net. In other words, she isn’t ready to make adult decisions because she has a very limited understanding of consequences. So, much to the chagrin of Dr. Schalet and many other progressive types, I will continue to parent; I won’t punt the responsibility to my child.
The Dutch parents I interviewed regard teenagers, girls and boys, as capable of falling in love, and of reasonably assessing their own readiness for sex.
Don’t call your eye doctor, you did just actually see the words “teenagers” and “reasonably assessing their own readiness for sex” in the same sentence. It’s probably not a stretch at this point to wonder whether Dr. Schalet was ever a teenager. Her op-ed scholarship continues in the next sentence:
Dutch parents like Natalie’s talk to their children about sex and its unintended consequences and urge them to use contraceptives and practice safe sex.
The implication, of course, is that American parents do not.
I am a practicing Roman Catholic, admittedly overprotective father and I’ve had conversations with my daughter on the subject. We went over every sex-education lesson she got in school, both before and after. Naturally, she wasn’t thrilled to be talking to her dad about any of it but she relaxed a little and actually brought it up after a while. We were able to do this because we have always communicated which, of course, is the foundation of any success a parent can hope to have once the kids start navigating the random waters of puberty. I harbor none of the illusions that Dr. Schalet continually implies “American parents” have. In the past year, I have talked to many parents from backgrounds far more diverse than the sample used in this book and found that I’m not an anomaly. Again, this isn’t olden times, many of us do try to communicate with our children now.
Let us move onto the most blood-boiling statement from Dr. Schalet:
Normalizing teenage sex under the family roof opens the way for more responsible sex education.
That is the second time in the article the word “normalizing” is used. Dr. Schalet employs the tired progressive academic tactic of defining the terms of a faulty premise from which to continue unabated on to predetermined conclusions. And these conclusions only work if you are willing to radically redefine normal as she sees it.
Which I am not.
Lol! I thoroughly enjoyed that!
I took it. And held it. A little longer than he was comfy with. And I explained:"I'm half lit, I'm armed, and I don't think you are right for my daughter". He 'didn't feel comfortable here'
It all worked out well. She later married a great guy that did 3 tours in the sandbox and postponed kids until married.
My newest granddaughter is less than 3 months old. ;)
/johnny
If somebody came to my house looking like that to take my daughter out, I would do the “Al Bundy” on him and slam his head into the door.
Satan has his way.....................................How about stupid is what stupid does? We already have this going on here in the USA, why so many teen pregnancies? This probably goes on more with single parent families, so the NYT wants to make it more universal. Why not, we already have same sex marriage and homosexuality being taught in the schools. Today I over heard a conversation between 2 grade school boys, it was appalling; “If I was gay, I’d be proud.” It truly was a WTF moment for my wife. I told her, that’s Liberal education for you. Forget History and Geography, its been replaced with PC Sociology. Satin must be smiling, our country is going to hell.
It’s bad enough when sad older people need to live life through their children, but this is taken it way to far by inviting this kind of behavior into their homes. Encouraging it.
Why make it just for teenagers? Why not community organize pre-teens into living together so they get messed up at an even younger age? These people are limited in their vision.
Half lit?
And she with 3 years Natl Guard went along with it.
I often think she vetted her 'dates' against me, as in, go before the dragon and steal the jewel..... knowing that most won't or can't.
But he did do KP the next morning, after a night where a buddy and I corralled him and fed him strong drink until his head was falling off the next day... you know, like that school after basic training. He didn't do anything bad that night. Waking up with the dog next to him may have damaged his self opinion, but not my look out.
I rarely have to resort to overt "What? I'm not burying a body here" anymore. I've matured.
/johnny
This makes sex into a worthless commodity with little meaning. Sex, something so intimate and powerful as to be able to create life, treated in such a cavalier, rutting fashion....reduces human beings to nothing but “trousered apes”.
It elevates the emotional over the intellect which will doom all societies. Delayed gratification is what makes the world turn, so to say. That longing and mystery which is created by delayed consummation until maturity, created literature geniuses and great inventors. That delay of immature feelings to the more mature adult understanding of what “love” really is and means....enriches and accentuates the intellectual pursuits—for once teenagers indulge in the sexual, the intellectual is dust. Rousseau even understood the importance of children to mature into adults before indulging in the sex act. They become corrupted otherwise, and won’t be able to evaluate mature feelings.
This is a conditioning into promiscuity....where there are no long term relationships, where there is no regard for emotional damage done to people who have no long term relationships....why do you think Twilight is so popular!!!!! It is human longing to have one person so devoted to you for eternity.....that will love you through thick and thin and always be there.
It is what creates people who will fight to the death and of course, governments hate that type of person.
This is to destroy all future relationships and put girls on toxins so they don’t reproduce. It is the Marxist agenda. Promiscuity....it is the circus and bread so that the elite puppeteers can control the intellectual midgets who won’t even know what is happening. They know how to have sex but never heard of Hayek....yep.....
Still able to pass a field sobriety test. Not full lit. See Cooter Brown (drunk as).
/johnny
tipsy
I was in high school and college in the ‘70s, and one thing that has been “interesting” to watch has been to see many contemporaries who lived like hippies in their own young lives turn into fairly strict parents years later.
Not saying that all turned into FR conservatives, but there were plenty who saw how messed up some of our classmates turned out to be and didn’t seem to want anything similar for their own kids.
ok so according to the NY Slimes, we must all be like the ZOHAN movies right??
I am glad I moved to an area where people just don’t read that paper.
Our kids are respectful and smart.
“Normal” being defined by a female Liberal member of the academented, who was ‘educated’ in Taxachussetts and at Berserkley? ? ?
“Normal” being defined by the same weltanschaung that produced the definition of “is”?
I LOVE IT :0)
Some friends of ours sent their 14 year old daughter to spend a summer with us at the ranch several years ago.
Hubby and a cowboy that was working at the ranch went to pick her up at the bus depot in town. The young cowboy was about 19 and had never been around city girls or people that were very open about sex, was a pretty good god-fearing kid. Said young cowboy had just bought his first pickup so he wanted to drive his new truck to town. Hubby and this kid picked up this girl that we hadn’t seen since she was about 8 years old and headed back to the ranch. At some point she looked at my hubby and said- oh did my parents tell you that I am now sexually active? Hubby real quick like said “NOT WHILE YOU ARE AT MY HOUSE!!” Young cowboy nearly ran his truck off in the canyon...
We had no idea her parents had become “enlightened” about sex and their daughters- she was actually proud of the fact that she was having sex. We were truly amazed, needless to say her visit didn’t go too well and she ended up going home after 2 weeks. That poor young cowboy stayed hid out the whole time she was there.
I chat with her parents once in a while on Facebook, they got too “cool” for us to stay close. I have no idea what happened to that daughter because they don’t mention her at all...but her younger sister has 6 kids, is divorced- lives with the parents- and get this- her unemployed “fiance” and his daughter also live there. I am sure glad we were not so open and “cool” with our daughters.
“Normal” being defined by a female Liberal member of the academented, who was ‘educated’ in Taxachussetts and at Berserkley? ? ?
“Normal” being defined by the same weltanschaung that produced the definition of “is”?
One thing back when I was a college student, I fooled around a little bit but I would not be comfortable to have my gf over at my parents house or fool with her while they are there.
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